Welcome to the Facebook group for The American Scholar, a lively forum about literature, the arts and sciences, history, society, politics, and public affairs.
Read more at theamericanscholar.org.
Read more at theamericanscholar.org.
Information
- Founded:
- 1932
Photos
1 albumSee All
TAS CoversUpdated about a month ago
The American Scholar Just posted from our Summer 2009 issue. Mike Rose argues that blue-collar workers don't get enough credit. He writes: "Although writers and scholars have often looked at the working class, they have generally focused on the values such workers exhibit rather than on the thought their work requires—a subtle but pervasiv......e omission. Our cultural iconography promotes the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no brightness behind the eye, no image that links hand and brain."
Blue-Collar Brilliance: an article by Mike Rose questioning assumptions about intelligence, work, an
www.theamericanscholar.org
Questioning assumptions about intelligence, work, and social class
The American Scholar Winter 2010 issue now online at theamericanscholar.org, and available in hard copy on the newstand. Enjoy!
The American Scholar Walter Long was a writer and he was my grandfather. He was courteous, charming, chivalrous, handsome, well-spoken, well-shaven, well-dressed, and completely senile. His mental decline began when I was a girl. In the end he didn’t know me, and he didn’t know his own son, my father. He was born in 1884. He wrote for four... or five decades until, starting sometime in the 1950s, dementia destroyed his writing process. We have a photo of Granddad writing with a dip pen at a slant-top writing table. He was a tall, thin man with a high forehead and a classic, almost Grecian, nose. He was a metropolitan reporter for Philadelphia’s leading newspaper, The Philadelphia Bulletin, before the era of regular bylines. What remains of his five decades of reportage? Nothing. His words have been obliterated, eradicated, annihilated. And what do we know about his brain? About his neurons, or ex-neurons? Almost nothing. Before me, my grandfather was the writer in the family. This abecedarium is dedicated to him. To his memory.
My Brain on My Mind: An article by Priscilla Long about the mysteries of memory | The American Schol
www.theamericanscholar.org
The ABCs of the thrumming, plastic mystery that allows us to think, feel, and remember
The American Scholar Gelareh Asayesh's first-person account of the riots following last summer's disputed presidential election in Iran.
The Stolen Election: An article by Gelareh Asayesh about Iran's disputed presidential election | The
www.theamericanscholar.org
An expatriate Iranian writer travels her troubled homeland in the weeks after last summer’s disputed presidential vote
The American Scholar
I spent four years on the book beat, and looking back — I took early retirement from the Post last summer — I’m still amazed and grateful for what it permitted me to do. An obsessive reader since childhood, I got paid to read mostly excellent books and have extended conversations with their smart and interesting author......s. And if those conversations threatened to become problematic for any reason, all I had to do was remember the Didion Rule:
When in doubt, ask writers about writing.
www.theamericanscholar.org
The American Scholar
"Immense practical challenges confronted anybody in the Middle Ages trying to study the literature and history of antiquity. Students of the classics today can consult critical editions of texts prepared by specialized scholars—a body of work that has grown exponentially ever since the humanists of Italy first began me...thodically to seek out, reconstruct, and study the literature of antiquity in the 14th and 15th centuries. Today’s scholars collaborate with careful editors and reputable publishers, and they supplement their editions of classic texts with user-friendly overviews that discuss the texts’ sources and authors and the historical and literary contexts in which the works were written. For ease of reading and reference, the texts contain title pages, tables of contents, geographical glossaries, maps, diagrams, pictures, explanatory glosses, footnotes, bibliographies, indexes, and recommendations for further study. They are divided into chapters, sections, and paragraphs, and are punctuated in a modern style.
"Francesco Petrarch, the prime mover of early Italian humanism, had none of this critical apparatus to help him."
www.theamericanscholar.org
The Renaissance writers and humanists Petrarch and Boccaccio turned to geography to understand the works of antiquity
The American Scholar invites you to follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheAmScho
twitter.com
Twitter is without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening right now.
The American Scholar welcomes you to our new Facebook page. Check here for links to our latest issue and articles from our archives dating back to 1932. More information on our homepage at www.theamericanscholar.org.
The American Scholar "During the last four decades, a well-publicized shift in what undergraduate students prefer to study has taken place in American higher education. The number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred fields, includin...g history. As someone who has taught in four university English departments over the last 40 years, I am dismayed by this shift, as are my colleagues here and there across the land. And because it is probably irreversible, it is important to attempt to sort out the reasons—the many reasons—for what has happened."
www.theamericanscholar.org
How it happened and what could be done to reverse it
The American Scholar
"Going to war brings with it the very real possibility of dying. When my brother Robert left for Iraq in September 2006, our family feared that his commitment might demand what is often called the highest price. Before he left, I imagined what it might be like as the sister of a dead soldier to tell everyone that he ha...d laid down his life in such a contentious struggle. I pictured the flag-draped coffin, the article in our local newspaper, the murmuring friends and neighbors filing through to praise the dead hero. Always a realist, I prepared myself for his death as the worst possible outcome. I failed to conceive of any scenario that could rival the bitter finality of his dying.
I soon discovered that giving one’s life can come in more than one form. For my brother, his life as he knew it was taken on January 14, 2007, in Baghdad, when an EFP—an explosively formed projectile device—detonated outside his Army Humvee, sending a shock wave through his brain, severely injuring him without leaving a mark on his body. Robert escaped death, but has paid a price almost as high. Today, he is back from war, 25 years old, brain-injured, and disabled. My brother accepted this risk when he signed his military contract in 2002 through the ROTC program at the University of Rhode Island. Although my family didn’t sign an agreement or contract, we have discovered that we are as bound to his commitment as he is himself. Before my brother’s injury, the phrase traumatic brain injury, or TBI, meant very little to my family. Now it defines our daily existence. The ongoing process of rehabilitation since his injury has tenaciously enmeshed each one of us, altering our plans, our family structure and interactions, our ideas about life and sacrifice, and most resolutely our belief that if he would only make it back home, everything would be okay."
www.theamericanscholar.org
A blast in Baghdad tests the endurance of a soldier and his family
The American Scholar "You’ve seen this story in countless Hollywood science-fiction movies, from The Terminator to War Games. Scientists develop a sophisticated computer or robot to assure the nation’s security, but something goes wrong and the technology itself mutates into a catastrophic threat. Unfortunately, the U.S. economic system no...w finds itself crippled by a real-life technology-gone-wrong story line. In this case, the culprit is not a Pentagon fighting machine, but rather the computer-based modeling and trading programs developed for Wall Street over the last quarter century."
www.theamericanscholar.org
How computer modeling worsened the financial crisis and what we ought to do about it
RECENT ACTIVITY
The American Scholar discussed English 101 on the The American Scholar discussion board.
